


Joffrey's Room

by ImhereImQuire



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post - A Storm of Swords, bereavement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2013-01-05
Packaged: 2017-11-23 19:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/625573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImhereImQuire/pseuds/ImhereImQuire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jaime's complicated feelings around Joffrey's death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Joffrey's Room

**Author's Note:**

> Its something which I very rarely see any fic or meta about, so I thought I'd have a go at tackling it myself.

He’d come in looking for Cersei, but she was already gone. Whether that was five minutes or an hour hence he could not have said, but he fancied the scent of her perfume still lingered in the air, the only ghost that did.

I should not be here, he thought to himself miserably. Joffrey was not my son. It was Robert whose attention Joffrey craved, Robert who held him aloft when he was first presented to the court, Robert whose name he bore. It was a hammer he had asked for on his tenth name day, even if Cersei did make sure it was a sword that he received.

It was for Cersei’s sake that he came, nothing else. This was where the servants said she’d be, where she always went after she snapped at Tommen, who was guilty of some minor transgression, such as daring to be alive when his older brother -stronger, and sharper and their mother’s favourite- was not. But she had gone, and he found himself alone, profoundly alone, and as self-indulgent as it was to stay he had no will to go.

Joffrey… always a strange child to Jaime’s mind, never quite right, a boy who didn’t quite understand the strange hypocrisies of the world; why gutting a hunted deer was met with paternal approval, but taking a knife to a fat bellied cat earned him a bloodied, broken toothed mouth. Joffrey who knew by the age of nine that his ‘father’ would fuck anything with a hole in its front after seeing Robert in the kitchens rutting up the skirts of a serving wench, and had taken to pinching his younger brother for three weeks after in a way which reminded Jaime of his twin.

Joffrey, a king before he was a man, a corpse before he was a man, too much of a little shit that many would mourn him. To know him was not to love him, and Jaime was sure that there were only two people in the world who could say that they genuinely cared for that child; Cersei, who had long since claimed him for her favourite, and the younger Clegane… and even he had abandoned him, or so the rumours went.

 Jaime wished he felt more, but he had always preferred Myrcella, himself. But then so had Robert, so had his uncles… and just like that the reality hit him: Tyrion had killed his son. No, he thought to himself, shaking his head to clear his mind of such treacherous thoughts. Tyrion could not have, he _would_ not have… but his faith in his brother could not stand against his sure and certain knowledge that Joffrey was not right, the way that Aerys was not right, and while that sort of thing was permissible in a prince he knew better than most how dangerous it was in a king so perhaps Tyrion had, and who could blame him?

Still, it was not the king he mourned when he sat himself heavily upon a bed which had not been slept in in too long, and, were Cersei to have her way would almost certainly never be slept in again. It was the son he had never had, never been allowed to have, nor hold, nor teach. It was the chance to tell Joff the truth that he’d never have now, the opportunity to let him know that he didn’t have to love the man who struck and shamed his glorious golden mother, to name his boy a lion. It was the babe in Cersei’s arms what seemed like barely any time at all ago, the one whose birth he had stood vigil over for a full day and a night, who was gone now, leaving nothing but a room full of clothing he would never grow out of and two matching half-moons of scarring in the meat and back of his hand…. Which he had lost, he realised, with a sudden, choking sense of desperation. Those scars had meant the world to him in the weeks following the birth, when he was forced to keep his distance from both mother and child, a sign of defiance and solidarity between he and his twin that he had looked upon with a proud smirk when he’d lain alone, proof of the symmetry and the magic which had given the child life, and demanded that as Cersei suffer so must he.

And they were gone.

He had lost it all. His firstborn son and the love between he and Cersei that had made him, and the hand which had borne witness to his birth, all gone; taken by the Stranger, somewhere beyond the reach of bitter knights, and grieving lionesses. And yet they were the victors, the ones who had apparently won the war.


End file.
